This month's panel: from zero to hero

Chris - Let me introduce you to the panel of people who are going to answer your questions this week. Tony Padilla is a theoretical physicist. He's a cosmologist at the University of Nottingham, and also a very popular science and maths communicator. He's made many appearances on the Numberphile YouTube channel, and he's also written a book recently, it's called 'Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them.' Why are some numbers, in your view, at least, a bit more fantastic than others, Tony?

Tony - I just love those numbers that are sort of wild and crazy and really make you think about the most fantastic physics that's out there. The physics of black holes and the early universe and all that sort of stuff. That's what numbers do for me. They make me think about magnificent physics.

Chris - Have you always been good at maths?

Tony - I've always liked maths. One of the stories I tell in my book is that when I first went to uni, I actually got zero in one of my first assignments. But this was because the tutor really wanted me to use a certain amount of pedantry that I wasn't comfortable with. All my arguments were right, he just didn't like how I'd laid it out on the piece of paper.

Chris - Were you studying maths at university?

Tony - I was studying maths. I think at that point I realised that I needed something else from my numbers which was physics, basically.

Chris - Michael Crichton, who wrote Jurassic Park, went to Harvard and was studying English to start with, and he became a bit disillusioned with the way that he said his tutors were teaching him. And he started submitting the work of some of the great masters of English. His autobiography said, when Blake scored a C at Harvard, he knew English was not for me. And he retrained in medicine and look what happened. He turned into an amazing producer of films and books and so on. So maybe you're following in Michael Creighton's footsteps.

Tony - I still love numbers though, Chris. I haven't turned to the other side completely, yet.

Chris - Also here is Emma Pomeroy, who's an archaeologist. She's at the University of Cambridge. You've joined us before, Emma, telling us all about your work with Neanderthals and our early ancestors. They keep on proving themselves to be more and more like us the more we learn about them, don't they?

Emma - They do. And it's one of these things where the more we delve, the more we realise that perhaps, humans, that we've built up to be this special, unique animal, perhaps we aren't that unique. And many of our close relatives, perhaps unsurprisingly, were capable of some of the things that we do and thought were unique to us.

Chris - People always say that it's good to be married to an archaeologist because they get more interesting the older they get. When you studied, did you have a sort of Tony moment? As in, get 0 on a paper which made you think in a certain way? Did you always decide, 'Right, I'm going to go and do palaeontology?'

Emma - Actually, I didn't really know. I've ended up as a biological anthropologist. I'm within an archaeology department, but I specialise in the study of human remains and the evolution of humans. I didn't know that was a thing before I went to university. I knew about archaeology. I'd grown up near Canterbury where there's archaeology all around, mediaeval city walls. And that really fired my imagination about learning about the past. And then I came to Cambridge as an undergrad quite a long time ago and discovered this field of biological anthropology and how humans evolved. It really just blew my mind as to how exciting that whole journey had been over the last 7 million years. And so here I am.

Chris - Thanks Emma. Andrew Morris is a retired science teacher. He's also an author. He is a big believer in continuing education and runs science discussion groups and things like that. Is the idea to get people interested in science no matter what their background is?

Andrew - It started as a bit of an experiment of my own, in fact, because I'd been teaching conventional physics and maths at A level in sixth form colleges. And I got more and more disillusioned with how restrictive the science is in an A level syllabus and how far it is from what it's actually like being a scientist. So I formed the view that people switch off science at school, not really because they are unscientific or anti-scientific. I believe people remain quite curious about the world, so I started a course for people, I marketed it for people who had no science background, but who nevertheless had questions and wanted to ask about the world. It might be the natural world or the physical world. And it went really well. And it just started from their questions.

Chris - Who are they?

Andrew - It's very attractive to women, who of course tend to be more excluded from science.

Chris - Thanks Andrew. Toby Wiseman is also here. He's a theoretical physicist at Imperial College. We recently asked Toby to speculate on the types of technologies that potential alien visitors might need if they were going to come and pay us a visit. That isn't actually what you do though, is it? What do you do at Imperial College?

Toby - I work mainly on Einstein's theory of gravity in different contexts - so a lot about black holes, a bit of cosmology, bit of string theory sometimes.

Chris - And was that borne out of some kind of childhood trauma or a 0 in an exam? Or was that because you always had a particular leaning towards physics?

Toby - There was no defining moment. I had a grandfather who was an engineer and taught me about designing things when I was very young and I was fascinated by how things worked. And so for a long time I wanted to be an engineer, but I think over time I really just enjoyed physics and loved it. It's the same wanting to know why things are the way they are - I fell into it in that way.